Scandal in the Night (11 page)

Those ladies of the
zenana
were most assuredly listening to Lady Summers talking amongst her
angrezi
coterie. “Doing it a bit brown, the colonel,” the lady said in reference to the opulent decor. “He’s a bit of a relic—a holdover from a past age. He’s the only one who doesn’t know it yet.”

“Yes.” One of the pursed-lipped matrons was quick to wave her wrist in offhand dismissal of the billowing silk curtains surrounding them. “It
is
all a bit much, don’t you think, the whole effect?”

“Hmm,” agreed Lady Summers, with a considerable jaded rolling of her eye. “Not at all the thing.”

“I think it’s magnificent.” Miss Catriona Rowan was bold enough to quietly disagree with the popular opinion. She looked about with a generous gaze. “Colorful and enchanting. This is a beautiful home. I admire it greatly.”

“Oh, my dear.” Lady Summers turned her condescension upon her niece. “We’ll have to see what we can do to rid you of all that blushing naïveté.”

His northern goddess was undaunted. “I’m hardly naïve, Aunt Lettice.”

Clearly Lady Summers was not used to being contradicted. One arched eyebrow rose high. “My darling child. One journey out of Scotland—such a savage place”—Lady Summer shuddered delicately—“hardly qualifies you as having a knowledge of the world. But it’s not your fault that your upbringing was so hopelessly provincial.”

Miss Rowan—she of the burning hair and just as cold-burning temper—stilled, pausing while the other ladies smiled and made patronizing murmurs of agreement. When she spoke, her voice was calm and deceptively soft. “My dear aunt Lettice, I hardly think the years I spent at school in Paris would qualify me as
provincial.
”

“Paris?” Lady Summers’s voice could not hope to regain its aggrandized heights.

Oh, it had pleased him so, to see his goddess thus. Catriona Rowan had calmly done what none of the other women of the clubby, cliquish expatriate set had ever done. She had easily given Lettice Summers as good as she got. Catriona Rowan might have looked ethereal, a spun-sugar confection of a girl in that gown the color of a virginal blush, but underneath was a spine as strong and unyielding as tempered steel. She had looked her silly, vain aunt calmly in the eye, and all but dared her to call Paris a provincial backwater. Not even Lettice Summers had that much self-delusion.

But perhaps Thomas Jellicoe had. He had been self-deluded enough that he was not prepared to hear Lord Summers introduce his Catriona Rowan to a new arrival.

“Birkstead. There you are. Been looking for you. Come, I have someone I want to introduce you to.”

A rime of frost chilled Thomas’s veins. No. Lord Summers could not possibly be so obtuse, or so … so destructive. Had the man not eyes and ears? Did he not understand how deeply, deeply ill-advised such a scheme was?

Evidently not. The new resident commissioner was most definitely pushing the scarlet-coated officer toward his niece. “Catriona, my dear, I give you Lieutenant Jonathan Birkstead. Lieutenant, her ladyship’s niece, Miss Rowan.” The resident commissioner continued with his introduction. “Let me recommend Lieutenant Birkstead to you as an excellent dinner partner, my dear.”

Thomas waited, watching for some sign that his all-knowing, all-seeing goddess would instantly see through the lieutenant, that her instinct for truth would show on her open face. But Miss Rowan hid all of her steel, and had retreated into tea-blush solemnity while giving the handsome lieutenant a long look from under her ginger lashes.

And something unruly and feral had rattled itself awake behind the cage of Thomas’s chest.

Not Birkstead. Anyone but Birkstead.

Thomas told himself the ferocity was logic—his objection stemmed from the fact that he had heard too much of Lieutenant Birkstead’s character to think
any
decent girl a fit companion for him. A girl as lovely and true as Catriona Rowan would be chewed up and spat out in no time by such a bounder as Birkstead.

But it was not logic. The feeling growling in his chest was an emotion he had forgotten he possessed—rank jealousy, unsheathing itself and sliding into his veins like a cold, insidious blade. A blade he wanted to bury to the hilt, deep in Birkstead’s rotten gut, when the man obediently took Miss Rowan’s arm and led her in to dinner.

This, then, ought to have been the end of his foolish infatuation. He ought to have forced himself to forget Thomas Jellicoe’s dangerous yearnings, and become Tanvir Singh once more, a man of self-discipline and keen understanding. A man who was too smart, too canny to give in to unbidden, dangerous desires.

But fate was a cruel, cruel, demanding mistress, and she was not done playing dice with him. As a single man, Tanvir Singh was seated near the officers, and at an unfortunately convenient distance to watch Birkstead, out of eyeshot of Lord Summers, ignore Miss Rowan at dinner. To the lieutenant, she was a discard, a cipher so far beneath his notice and that of his clubby, closed-minded mates that they talked around her—sitting right next to them at the table—as if she were deaf and dumb, and not a beautiful, sentient, thinking human being.

“I understand Miss Rowan is from Scotland? No wonder she came out to India,” the lieutenant joked, nodding in apparent great humor to the man on his right. “India is bad enough, but Scotland? Lord save us from that posting.”

Thomas was incensed for her, even though he had suffered much the same treatment at many of the same hands. But he had been disregarded because his skin was browned and his hair was wrapped in a turban. She was one of
them.
They should be cleaving to her and making her one of their own.

But perhaps, his traitorous mind whispered, just perhaps the pale Miss Rowan had no more wish to be one of them than Thomas had. Perhaps. Because she withdrew from the lieutenant even more, and ate very little, holding herself back behind the fortress of her self-control.

Her quiet, self-possessed distress was all the fuel Thomas needed to fan the fire of his growing obsession with this
angrezi
girl, whom he imagined saw the world much as he did. But as Tanvir Singh, he had to wait and bide his time, pretending to pay attention to self-important men and their self-aggrandizing prating, when all he was really doing was keeping track of Miss Rowan.

At nine thirty-five, when the ladies excused themselves from the dinner table, she stood quietly and let the whole of the company women pass before she followed, walking behind two aging matrons who were too engrossed in their gossip to include her in the conversation. At ten-fifteen, she walked to the other side of the pavilion slowly, with a sort of fey, unhurried grace that would drive the brittle harpies amongst them to make up stories about her. At ten thirty-four she spoke briefly to Lord Summer, who smiled and patted her on the head fondly as if she were a spaniel dog. And at eleven forty-seven, after gentlemen joined the ladies on their side of the pavilion for polite, stilted chitchat where the English ladies hardly knew how to speak to a native man like Tanvir Singh and so kept mum, leaving him to silence, she excused herself. She squared her shoulders, and shook out her skirts, and headed determinedly outside, slipping away into the garden.

But unlike him, poor Miss Rowan was not as adept at watching and reading people. And although she may have seen the handsome Lieutenant Birkstead wander off into the gardens, she clearly had not seen her aunt slip out first into the covering seclusion of the dark.

And so Thomas followed Miss Rowan.

He shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t have disregarded all instinct, practical experience, and professional acumen to spend an evening satisfying his curiosity about a girl—an English girl, who was off-limits for more reasons that he cared to contemplate, but who drew him the way some ancient memory drew migrating swallows south to warmer climes for the winter.

And that was the measure of how stupid he had become—he was thinking of swallows, English swallows, swooping and diving swiftly over English fields. He hadn’t thought of them in years. By disciplined necessity, his mind had remained completely occupied with the here and now, by grand strategies and minute, telling details alike, by reading the truth in men’s faces and not in their words. In deciding how to preserve his identity while uncovering the identities of other players in the Great Game.

But that night Thomas had closed his mind to the game. He had not reminded himself that it was no business of Tanvir Singh’s if bright young things got themselves harsh lessons in reality, or if pompous idiots like her uncle, Lord Summers, got themselves cuckolded at dinner parties. No.

Instead, he had followed her. He followed her through the lantern-lit courtyard and toward the seclusion of the gazebo in the dark, walled, private garden. He followed her simply because he wanted to. He wanted to see more of her. He wanted to prove to himself that his pale goddess could not possibly be attracted to that oily scoundrel Birkstead—the lieutenant was spoken of in the bazaar as
Badmash
Sahib, Sir Scoundrel.

He wanted to believe she was different.

So he followed Catriona Rowan’s swift, graceful flight through the dark meanders of the garden, led along by the pale shimmer of her dress billowing out like wings. But at the heart of the garden she stopped. Abruptly. And took two small steps back, as still as a hovering falcon, listening to the voices coming from the little gazebo.

“You far outshine all the other ladies, Lettice. You know that.” The voice was Birkstead at his most ingratiatingly false.

“Even my pale little niece?”

Thomas could picture Lettice Summers’s sinuous simper. But in the shadow outside the gazebo, all he could see was Catriona Rowan’s pale, frowning face at the mention of her own name. She stepped fractionally closer, listening with even more attention. Thomas leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He could not bear to see her so abruptly disillusioned.

“Who?” Birkstead murmured.

Lettice’s musical little laugh wafted out over the gardenias. “My Scots-Irish little niece, with whom you had dinner. You know he brought her here for you, dear Lieutenant—Summers did. I think he thinks to make a match for you with the little midge of a girl.”

The handsome lieutenant was as shallow as he was indiscreet. “Scots-Irish? Savages the lot. Whey-faced Scottish chits don’t interest me, Lettice darling. You do.”

Lettice Summers let out a breathless, throaty laugh of encouragement. “Well, then, you’ll have to
pretend
to keep Summers happy.”

“
Have
to? I’m to let myself be seen courting a Scots-Irish girl with a brogue as thick as oatmeal? Good God, Lettice, have you no pride for me?”

“You have enough pride for both of us, darling. But Jonathan, you don’t have to marry her, you just have to court her. Don’t you see—she presents the perfect excuse for you to visit the residency, and come to
me
.”

“Ah. Now that
is
almost an interesting proposition. Why don’t you see if you can get your husband to dower the little red chit, and then I won’t have to pretend.”

“Jonathan. You’re
too
bad.” Lady Summers’s laugh was encouraging.

“And that’s why you come to me, Lettice darling. To be very bad with me.”

Catriona Rowan finally turned away. The pale slice of the moon washed her face in cool silver, and all traces of the glowing, flame-bright goddess had vanished. Her lovely, open face had closed like a fist to absorb the blow, trying desperately to find somewhere safe to hide the inescapable pain and mortification deep within herself.

And he, Thomas Jellicoe, who never felt anything when he watched people lie and steal and hope and die, felt … responsible somehow. Because he had known this was going to happen, and he had done nothing to prevent her being hurt. Because he had wanted her to be disillusioned by the lieutenant. Even if it meant discovering her aunt was an adulterer.

And as Tanvir Singh, he knew what it meant to be judged on one’s race and ancestry, to be an outsider. To never feel at ease, to remain always at least one step apart. If he were honest, it was the metaphorical lash across his back—the impetus that drove him toward her.

But he wasn’t strictly honest. He was smitten.

Thomas toed a pebble loose and sent it skittering toward her, to warn her that she was not alone. To give her time to recover herself before he spoke. “Miss Rowan.” He whispered low, and bowed to her, courteously, correctly. “Come away.”

She shook her head, as if she would insist on staying—on punishing herself by listening to the unmistakable sound of rushing breath, and lips meeting flesh in the prelude to carnal knowledge. But then she changed her mind.

He was about to say, “Let me show you the way,” when she spoke.

“Please, don’t. Don’t say a word,” she said as she rushed past, away from the gazebo and the palace house and their inhabitants, into the deeper darkness so that she could hide the livid flush of humiliation that stained her otherwise pale cheeks.

But she had not his intimate knowledge of the deep garden, and in another moment she would run herself down the high-hedged path into a locked gate, with nowhere to turn but back toward him.

He had trailed after her, he told himself, only to show her the way back. To ease her way, and make her dignified return as painless as possible. He owed her that much by playing with her for his own selfish purposes.

But Miss Catriona Rowan was not taking her disappointment like the elegant, self-controlled lady he thought her. She was determined and angry, and when he came into sight of the gate, she was hiking up her voluminous skirts and giving him an astonishingly good view of her slender, stockinged legs as she hitched her petticoats into the top of her garters.

The sight of her long white legs made him stupid. “What are you doing?” So bloody stupid he sounded like Thomas Jellicoe, and not Tanvir Singh.

But she was too angry to notice his lapse out of the vernacular. “Climbing over,” was all she said, before she balanced one slippered foot on the iron hinge in preparation to throw her other leg over the top, and climb into the begum’s private garden.